E3-2009: Nintendo leans on Mario for success

Nintendo kicked off its E3 press conference with a new Super Marios Bros for Wii game that allows four person play and some new surprises like propeller suits for players. The new game will be out this holiday season.

There is also a new Wii Fit Plus that will allow you to personalize your workout and focus on areas you want to strengthen, condition or tone. The game will feature 15 new balance games and six new strength and yoga exercises. Wii Fit Plus will hit this fall as a standalone game or bundled with the Wii Balance Board. Wii Fit has sold 15 million units so far.

Bill Trinen, senior manager of product marketing came out and showed off the precision of the Wii Motion Plus accessory for the Wii Remote, which will come with Wii Sports Resort. He showed how the addition makes movements even more precise, following the angles and slight movements of the remote. He showed a skydiving game where you control your skydiving Mii by just angling the Wii Remote. An archery game allows you to pull back the nunchuk which corresponds to the string on the bow. A basketball shootout allowed Trinen and Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime to duke it out by tossing in three pointers.

Reggie showed off some work by Square Enix to support the Wii and the DS. A new version of Kingdom Hearts will be made for the DS arriving on Sept. 29.

There’s also a new RPG called Mario & Luigi Bowser’s Inside Story which will finally be available in North America and Europe for this fall. Speaking of RPGs, Golden Sun DS is coming back with Golden Sun DS.

On the DS front, THQ is putting out a new game by author James Patterson called Women’s Murder Club, Games of Passion, which allows women to uncover a murder mystery. There’s also a new open world game called COP: The Recruit.

For teen girls and 20 somethings there’s Style Savvy, a new DS fashion game where you run a boutique and outfit characters in clothes.

Now onto the DSi. Nintendo has sold more than 1 million DSis in the US since launching two months ago. But they’ve also sold 400,000 DS Lites during that time. The DSi is really encouraging personalization and user generated content. There’s a another Mario vs. Donkey Kong available as a DSi Ware game on June 8 in which you will be able to create levels and upload them. Wario Ware DIY will also allow you to design a mini game and upload them. And one more thing on user generated content. This summer, users will be able to upload DSi edited pictures to Facebook.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata came out to talk about market expansion and said that there are still plenty of people to reach out to provided you have the right software and you make games more accessible. As a sneak peak he showed off an apparently upcoming product called Wii Vitality Sensor which can measure your pulse through your finger and determine your state of relaxation.

“We believe that when previous strict definitions of games are removed and more and more software are developed without regard to skill and difficulty level the wonderful potential of our kind of entertainment can blossom in full,” said Iwata.

The Mario news isn’t over, said Nintendo communications exec Cammie Dunaway. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is on the way to the Wii. Reggie highlighted three third-party titles coming exclusively to the Wii later this year including the Conduit from Sega, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles from Capcom and Dead Space: Extraction from EA.

One more thing on edgier games. Nintendo is teaming with Team Nija to create a new Metroid Prime game called Metroid: Other M due out in 2010. Reggie said the game will take you further into the story of Samus.

It’s a good story for Nintendo, especially on the third-party front. It’s nice to see Mario front and center. And with Wii Fit, it’s a no brainer to come out with a sequel. Will it be enough to keep up the hot momentum of the Wii? We’ll see.